MorphOS Greetings from Hong Kong

I’m currently on travel in Hong Kong, China and South Korea. I bought a PowerBook to take with me as my only Computer (+ mobile phone of course). The plan was to work a little bit on the free time on the MUIIDE and try MorphOS on the daily use.
Now some time is passed and it worked rather nicely. I had some problems in China to connect to the WLAN access point (it somehow worked but very slow). I switched to mobile phone 3G/4G WLAN sharing (iPhone) to MorphOS which works nicely. In South Korea and Hong Kong the WLAN in Hotel works flawlessly. Now it’s common that every Hotel room has it’s own WLAN access point in the room. If you often switch the Network it’s a little bit trouble, because sometimes the Network will go down when then WLAN disappears but will not come up again if it appears again (or an other known one). Even go to Network settings and force to the new WLAN does not help, but after a Restart of the Computer everything is fine.

MUIIDE – the next mile stone

Finally I got it working saving and loading also works now for events, as I described before I had to relocate the complete Eventhandler routine to make that possible (in an abstract way).
Now it’s also possible to add multiple Windows. (But only the first one is open by default), I have to think about how to solve it, but of course you can open the other Windows in the OnShow Event of the MainWindow. Or as I show in the Video on Button Press.
A little demonstration (featuring “awesome drawing skills” icon 😉 ):

Notice to me, stop Delitracker before recording, or the mouse pointer whips with the Music 😉
After that is finished I guess the next one will be properties which are other classes, like Menu or List at the ListView.
I also have some ideas how to deal with special Values (like the Window inital position, MUIV_Window_LeftEdge_Centered and so on) but this will need a little bit more thinking and of course much work 😛 .

MUIIDE Menu loading / saving

Back to topic, after this little Vampire excursion, I continued working on MUIIDE especially the loading and saving, atm. I just save/load a project file which is a simple XML very easy for Trees to handle in XML and also can save nearly every content. But of course with this it will be not possible to export the source code and reload it to add an additional item… especially if you changed the source. It will be very difficult to make that happen, of course Lazarus does this… but Lazarus is a code monster difficult to dig out how this is done and maybe thats even not transferable to my code. I’m not sure what to do here.
Loading and saving for the properties is already finished and working well, but at this position I noticed that I did the eventhandler keeping wrong this way I can not save them to the project file, seems need some more thinking.
After that is finished I will try to add class properties, like Menu (Window), List (on a ListView) and so on Also thinking about to make the project multi window compatible, so that it really can hold the complete application not just a window, then the root of my Tree should be application and not Window.

Vampire 2.7 FPU

I just found out you can turn off the FPU with “VCONTROL FP=0” sometimes it work, sometimes not (just crashing, if this because of my sloppy power on the Vampire or just bad timing, who knows). But after it you can start FEmu as with 2.5 and the testcodes work again. Also MUIMapparium FPU Version is working :-D.
In principle that would be the better alternative to the current situation, implement single precision inside the FPGA and trap the rest, which can then be covered by FEmu. Would make Quake and Demos and so on fast, but would not violate the IEEE 754.

In the current situation Amiga (Vampire) is not anymore IEEE 754 compliant. The Double format is now something like 24 bits significant (like IEEE Single) with 11 bits exponent (like IEEE double) because it can still go to 1e308 but the significant precision is much lower as shown before. Also strange if you multiply two big numbers to produce an overflow for example 1e200 * 1e200 in double precision that would give “+Inf” or an exception, but Vampire FPU shows 1.8e+308 (something close to the max Double Value) and you can continue to calculate with that.

Vampire 2.7 FPU Part 2

I played a little bit more with the Vampire FPU the yesterdays example shows an other interesting effect, the calculation of a * 1.3 shows an incorrect result. There is some problem in the last places when comparing with 68882 A1200 or 68060 UAE.
Let’s dig a little bit deeper into that, test how well the double precision calculation works. MUIMapparium needs Double precision everywhere, I tested to make it single but the calculation really get very wrong results (Eiffel tower somewhere near London, such stuff). To test double precision we multiply a very small value to 1 very often to see if it correctly handle the bits. for example like this:

as you can see we multiply the 1 in b with 1 and a very little bit more, and this little bit more is just over the single precision limit. How the result look like:

Vampire 2.7

1.0000000000000000E+000

Amiga 1200 68882

1.0000100000502183E+000

Linux x86_64

1.0000100000494698E+000

ehm.. no Vampire thats wrong. Seems it does calculate all FPU calculations in single precision, so even they repair the rounding problem MUIMapparium still would be not usable.
Btw. I tried the same thing with the FEmu back in the days and it worked, as expected.
So maybe thats also the reason for the very good benchmark results… you make the calculations in single instead of double of course you can be much faster (and the original 68k FPUs calculate everything in extented so even more precise). I really think about to go back to Gold 2, it was slower but reliable.
As always the downloads: TestFPU3, TestFPU3.pas

Vampire V2.7 with FPU

The new Vampire firmware is released V2.7 which contains a Hardware FPU in the FPGA (some seldom 68881/68882 commands are still emulated, like the 68060/68040 also do) but nevertheless, thats very nice for my MUIMapparium (you remember the problem?). Of course I flashed directly the new version, first the bad news, it’s VERY unstable for me, it’s said it needs some soldering because there are some errors on the early Vampire cards which make the power supply to the FPGA bad… something like this and I’m affected with that … so it’s a little bit annoying to work with it because there are drawing errors on the screen and it crashes often. I reduced the screen resolution and ended all background program which made it much better. But nevertheless to really try it out I have to wait until someone fix my card. I can’t do that myself, most scary thing in the world a coder with a screwdriver let alone a soldering equipment :-P.
But this was not the topic of this post. I tried MUIMapparium FPU version on my new Vampire 2.7… good news it starts does not crash, bad news the map stays empty. The same Executable worked well with FEmu (I checked especially before I flashed the new one) on the old Gold 2 and still work in UAE. But the FPU calculation seems to work because the mouse pointer movement shows reasonable coordinates. I was a little bit surprised because even the GUI in the map window was gone. I checked the code ah yes there is a tiny floating point calculation, fine let’s see whats that. An my guess was right it is the floating point calculation, the Button size is calculated by the Font Size * 1.2 to have a little bit more space around it. After adding some debug output it seems that the floating point calculation works well but the rounding always return zero, so I wrote a little test program to test the rounding here the outputs of the testprogram in my setups:

Na? who spots the difference. Funny that only Round() have this problem but ceil, trunc, floor not. This also explains why MUIMapparium shows no maps at all, if all is rounded to 0. Ok I have to wait until they fix that… yeah I could replace all Round(a) by Floor(a+0.5) but why should I do that, here is clearly something broken in the FPGA.

You want to try on your own computer – Exe for m68k with FPU: TestFPU and the source: TestFPU.pas

MoGit Source on GitHub

I created a repository for MoGit on Github today. It was also the first time to really use MoGit in a real world situation and my first push using the MorphOS git client. Sadly there are some problems with the local certificates so I had to deactivate the certificate checking but besides this it worked nicely, MoGit and git. I was able to push to Github :-D.

MoGit 0.1 – the next day

The implementation yesterday was so easy that I thought it would be nice to also see/check the changes before you commit them (with git this is all a little bit strange because you have to “stage/add” them) it was a little bit more difficult than I thought. The command line options are a little bit crazy sometimes not very logical. But it works now. Just open the MoGit with the parameter “check” (the log view you get without it or with “log” as first parameter, the second parameter should be the path to the repository to inspect)

Still quick and dirty 😉 but for me thats already a big help. I guess the development will stop here and I will continue on the MUIIDE. But still if someone interested: MoGit 0.1.

MoGit – a git log viewer for MorphOS

I try to write natively my MUIClass on MorphOS these days. I will go on a travel for some days and will get my PowerBook with MorphOS with me to continue coding in the free time. That git is available for MorphOS makes it much easier to transfer the code to it (and track/commit and so on). But I’m very spoiled by Tortoise on Window and RabbitVCS on Linux to operate repositories (mostly svn but also some git) so I really miss some features here, most of all the easy checking of the log and see which files are changed and what was changed in the commit.
Today I wrote a little utility to help me with that, just showing the git log, and the changed files which you can double click, and the diff is shown in the Scribble (which has Highlighting for diff files, nice)
A little Demonstration:

Took me around two hours to write it 😉 I really like my new MUIClass package (and FreePascal) the most of it I was reading git manual pages (omg so many options). So it’s just a quick and dirty program but if someone is interested: MoGit Download. It needs the current git release 2.16.2.6 and scribble to view the diff (both pathes can be configured with the ini file in the archive). Have fun